Nation Review’s Andy McCarthy writes:
President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder contend that America’s civilian federal prisons are secure. Our “supermaxes,” they insist, are up to the task of confining the most lethal terrorists. Even if that were true (and history shows it is not), the argument is the most hollow of strawmen. These terrorists are not going to escape — they are going to walk right out the prison gates. They are going to be freed by a perverse new legal system, an ad hoc creation of progressive federal judges, assisted mightily by an Obama Justice Department rife with lawyers whose former firms and institutions spent the last eight years representing America’s enemies.
It didn’t have to be this way. President Obama could have gone to Congress and won legislation creating a durable, long-term, and sustainable framework for legal detention. One not just for detainees currently at Guantanamo, but for future high-value captures outside of Afghanistan. But Obama chose a different path. Heritage fellow Cully Stimson explains why:
So what is really going on here? To those of us who have either served in senior policy posts and dealt with these issues on a daily basis, or followed them closely from the outside, it is becoming increasingly clear that this administration is trying to create the appearance of a tough national-security policy regarding the detention of terrorists at Guantanamo, yet allow the courts to make the tough calls on releasing the bad guys. Letting the courts do the dirty work would give the administration plausible cover and distance from the decision-making process. The numbers speak for themselves.
Of the 38 detainees whose cases have been adjudicated through the habeas process in federal court in Washington, 30 have been ordered released by civilian judges. That is close to an 80 percent loss rate for the government, which argued for continued detention. Yet, how many of these decisions has this administration appealed, knowing full well that many of those 30 detainees should not in good conscience be let go? The answer: one.
Letting the courts do it for him gives the president distance from the unsavory release decisions. It also allows him to state with a straight face, as he did at the Archives speech, “We are not going to release anyone if it would endanger our national security, nor will we release detainees within the United States who endanger the American people.”
No, the president won’t release detainees; he’ll sit back and let the courts to do it for him.
Where Are The Washington Post And New York Times On The Richardson Story?
Author: Hans Von Spakovsky
Last Friday I had a post about the Justice Department’s dismissal of a public corruption case against New Mexico governor Bill Richardson. The AP reported that sources within Justice said the investigation had been killed in Washington. More evidence of that possibility comes from a letter sent by the U.S. Attorney in New Mexico, Gregory Fouratt, who is not an Obama political appointee, but a career lawyer appointed by the federal judges in his circuit to fill the vacancy in the U.S. Attorney’s office.
The purpose of the letter was to notify Richardson and his political donor, a company called CDR, that the “United States will not seek to bring charges.” But the letter goes on to say that CDR and its officers “made substantial contributions to Governor Richardson’s political organization during the time that the company sought financial work” with the state government and “pressure from the governor’s office resulted in the corruption of the procurement process so that CDR would be awarded such work.” The notification letter “is not to be interpreted as an exoneration of any party’s conduct.”
This is a very unusual letter, as anyone who has worked at the Justice Department can tell you. If one takes the innocent view, it could mean that Fouratt was telling the defendants that he knows they acted corruptly and illegally but they just got by with it because he does not have quite enough evidence to go to a jury with, but he is keeping his eye on them.
On the other hand, if you take a more cynical and jaundiced view, especially given the apparent political nature of many decisions in the Holder DOJ, the content of this letter supposedly clearing Richardson provides evidence that the AP story was correct and it was not the decision of the U.S. Attorney to dismiss this case. Fouratt came as close as he could to saying that in the letter without doing so directly. You don’t have to do much reading between the lines to see that Fouratt may have been angry about being told by his political bosses in D.C. to dismiss an investigation that had revealed “corruption of the procurement process” by the governor’s office.
But none of the media denizens of the press like the Washington Post or the New York Times are interested in this story from any standpoint other than reporting that Richardson, a political ally of President Obama, is now free and clear of a federal investigation because of claimed intervention by the president’s political appointees at Justice.